1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a wireless application protocol (WAP) service, and more particularly, to a method for directly providing a WAP service (including the case of providing a WAP service together with a web service) for wireless Internet in an actual content provider (or a WAP server) on the Internet, instead of using the relay server of a mobile business company providing a communications channel between a mobile communications network and the Internet, and a method allowing a content provider to intermediate between a wireless Internet terminal and another content provider on the Internet for realizing a portal service.
2. Description of the Related Art
The convenience of mobile communications terminals has rapidly expanded the market for mobile communications terminals throughout the world. The market for mobile communications terminals started with analog cellular phones and has expanded to digital cellular phones and further to personal communications service (PCS) phones. In addition, the market for terminals related to IMT2000 for the next generation mobile communications is gradually being formed. The development of mobile communications technology has allowed a mobile communications terminal to access a data network such as the Internet, and thus a variety of wireless application services (hereinafter, referred to as a wireless Internet service), such as Internet content service through a mobile communications network have been developed.
However, mobile communications terminals have limits in available resources such as power supply, the size and visibility of a display, transmission rate, and processor and memory capacities in view of mechanical characteristics. Accordingly, communications protocols and/or content expression formats (document forms) for the wireless Internet, which allow users to use various wireless Internet services through mobile communication terminals, are designed to be simple in consideration of the limited resources of mobile communications terminals, as compared to protocols and/or document formats allowing users to access the Internet through computers and use web services.
Among the communications protocols that have been standardized or are being standardized for the wireless Internet, a representative one is the wireless access protocol (WAP) suggested by the WAP forum. The representative document format for the wireless Internet is the wireless markup language (WML) corresponding to a hypertext markup language (HTML) used for a web service on the Internet. FIG. 1 schematically illustrates the configuration of a conventional system for a wireless Internet service and the operation thereof.
As shown in FIG. 1, a conventional WAP service model is composed of a WAP terminal 110 which is a mobile communications terminal supporting the WAP, a WAP proxy/gateway 120 (usually managed by a mobile communications business company) which acts as a relay server for providing a communications channel between a mobile communications network and the Internet, and a content provider 130 which is a web server on the Internet.
Once a user of the WAP terminal 110 requests a wireless Internet service or enters the universal resource locator (URL) of the server 130 by operating, for example, a keypad on the WAP terminal 110, the WAP terminal 110 interprets user input and transmits a wireless Internet service request to the WAP gateway 120 based on a WAP mode.
The WAP gateway 120 has, in addition to the simple relay function, a function of converting the WAP service request received from the WAP terminal 110 into a web service request (HTTP request) for web service on the Internet. The WAP gateway 120 transmits the HTTP request to the server 130 on the Internet. During the conversion, a security mechanism applied to a WAP service request message is released, and a security mechanism for a HTTP request message is newly applied.
Next, the web server 130 on the Internet interprets the HTTP request, performs appropriate processes, and transmits the result as a HTTP response to the WAP gateway 120. For example, when a particular web page is requested, the particular web page is transmitted as a response. When a common gateway interface (CGI) or a script application program is selected, the result of executing the corresponding application program is transmitted as a response.
The WAP gateway 120 converts the HTTP response received from the web server 130 into a WAP response and transmits the WAP response to the WAP terminal 110. During this procedure, a security mechanism is released and reset.
Finally, the WAP terminal 110 receives the WAP response, interprets a WML deck, and shows a first card to the user. Here, the term “deck” indicates a data transmission unit in the wireless Internet, and the term “card” indicates a screen display unit which is displayed on the screen of the WAP terminal 110 at one time.
As described above, the conventional wireless Internet service model is very weak in terms of security. In other words, the security between the WAP gateway 120 and the WAP terminal 110 is usually set using a wireless transport layer security (WTLS), and the security between the WAP gateway 120 and the web server 130 on the Internet is usually set using an HTTP security (HTTPS) or a secure socket layer (SSL), so data can be revealed at the WAP gateway 120 managed by a mobile business company. Accordingly, the conventional wireless Internet service model does not guarantee end-to-end security. Moreover, since data processing at every WAP layer is performed in the WAP gateway 120, a bottleneck may occur.
The user of a particular WAP terminal 110 can be provided only with the services provided by the mobile business company managing the particular WAP terminal 110. Accordingly, communications with another WAP terminal user using a different mobile business company is not available. This restricts the openness of the Internet.
In addition, a content provider providing a web service on the Internet is required to separately construct, maintain and repair the same content for each mobile business company. Accordingly, unnecessary expenses are incurred.